| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Anyway I have had barbecue in some form each day on this trip, but this was the first really good barbecue. Their baked beans were pretty tasty also. Their coleslaw was made by someone who does not like coleslaw, but wanted to say that the meal came with it. Nobody who likes coleslaw grinds up the cabbage to a paste and then puts on dressing. Uh-uh. That's someone who let their food processor get away from them and didn't care.
Eating coleslaw is about eating cabbage. It is about chewing cabbage and getting a satisfying crunch. If you can suck coleslaw through a straw, you wouldn't want to. I heard someplace that not a lot is known about porcine geriatrics. Pigs are not useful to humans for anything but meat. You raise a pig to slaughter it. Wild pigs may live to old age, in captivity people don't hold onto them to old age. That's a depressing thought to end the day on.
Back to the room to write. I actually got caught up in the log early and could watch most of a film on TV. Midway. Boy, if you wanted to make a case that time travelers were going back in time and tampering, that would be one of the points. The Japanese needed to know if there were American carriers in the area and if so, where they were. They sent scout planes out to look and all the scout planes went out just fine except the one that was to go in the critical direction. It had engine trouble and left an hour late. Then it could not radio its information. A second scout plane sent in the same direction had problems with its radio and it could not report. Some really low-probability events in general, but in this case they lined up just perfectly to keep from the Japanese exactly the piece of information that they needed so desperately. The net result is they lost five or so aircraft carriers. I think we lost only the Yorktown. If it happened in a piece of fiction it would be bad writing.
After the film I did some reading and went to sleep about 11:45 PM.
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08/21/97--Little Rock and Hot Springs, Arkansas:
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I woke up about 5 AM. I added to last night's entry the stuff about Midway. At breakfast we talked to a flying enthusiast from New York who had come to Memphis to see the exhibition on the Titanic. We talked about flying and the Titanic. Current thinking is that the iceberg did not cut the Titanic, it was just so heavy it pushed in the side, pushing the rivets right through their holes. It bent the hull, it didn't cut it. He also mentioned that the original Memphis Belle is at Mud Island. We probably should have gone out there. Well, it is a little late now. He mentioned his daughter was into the Internet and I was going to suggest to him that he wait a month or so and then put 'Leeper' and 'southeast' in a search engine and he could get this trip log. Evelyn signaled me not to. I guess she figured he would not be able to find us.
We set out for Little Rock listening to a Zane Gray story. Little Rock does not seem to advertise their most famous point of interest, Central High School. It made national news when the town resisted integration. I guess they are not so proud of this piece of history. We are headed west-southwest on Route 40.
We are passing Stuttgart. A great deal of Arkansas seems to be named for someplace else. The state name seems an allusion to Kansas, then there is Texarkana, Arkadelphia, Mountain View, Washington, Eureka Springs, Helena, and Camden. Nobody wanted to live here? Then there are place names that are tributes to famous people. Perhaps this is where Washington should go. Does it refer a place or a person? There is Wilson, Harrison, Van Buren, Pocahontas, and Powhatan. Then there are silly names like Smackover and Dogpatch.
Well, we blew into Little Rock about 10:30 AM. I had done my homework to see where all the exciting places to visit in Little Rock are. While the AAA book did not come right out and say it, the set of attractions painted the town as a place that was not so much lackluster as tangibly boring. One place they did not list is Central High School, the school that President Eisenhower had to send in troops to integrate in 1958. Opposing it was Governor Orval Faubus. I figured the town was trying to forget the whole incident. Of course, I wanted to see it. But Little Rock is a big place. We drove around the downtown. It did not present itself to us. I suggested we look in a phone book. We drive around and find a pay-phone. In this day and age pay phones don't have phone books. Well, in the center of town there is a hotel. I bet their phones have phone books. We park in town to go either there or the visitor center. If the AAA book does not mention it as a tourist attraction, they probably don't want to open old wounds. Better just to find it ourselves.
We walk into the hotel. The doorman sees us and I bluff by nodding to him. He nods back. We go in and find telephones. Yes, there is a phone book. But finding a school is not that easy. It is not in the white pages under Central or Yellow Pages under Schools. Evelyn finds it under Little Rock. 1500 South Park. But South Park is not on the map.
We go to the south end of town and drive west looking for South Park. We see a sign directing us toward the school. We pass by where they are building the Central High Visitor Center and Museum. Well, perhaps they are not trying to bury the past. It is a nice looking high school. We get out and walk to the front door. Okay, I guess we have seen it.
Back into the car and off we go to Hot Springs, where William Clinton grew up. Rainwater goes underground 4000 to 8000 feet, it is heated geothermally and raises back to the surface. Somewhere around here, according to legend, is the great Fondu Lac where bubbling molten cheese comes roiling to the surface. That is only certain times of the year and the locals have a festival. They bake loaves of bread which they impale on these things that look like boat hooks. They then thrust the bread into the Fondu Lac, leave it a moment, then pull it out and eat the cheese and bread. It is very exciting. I heard a report about it on National Public Radio at one point.
That is not what we did for lunch. After stopping at the Visitors Center, we drove around looking for a place to eat and found a Czech restaurant called the Bohemian. Evelyn and I order nearly identical orders of Chicken Paprikash and salad. It claims to come with dumplings, but they are more like slices of bread.
We went to the Quality Inn where our greeting was extremely friendly. They made sure we got a discount. (We would have gotten one anyway for being Lucent, but they keep a stack of magazine with ads that say show this ad and get a 10% discount.) In fact, it is a town with economic problems and they have a motel that has some maintenance problems. In our case, it is really hard to get the front door closed. The toilet sticks, and there was a wet washcloth in the bathroom. But being super-friendly gets the customer on your side right away.
Our first site is the Mid-America Science Museum. This is one of the many science museums that have followed the lead of the San Francisco Exploratorium. At a guess it may be a third of the size, but it has the same sort of hands-on exhibits. Where this museum had an advantage is it included my hands. There were no little kids pushing their way to the front of queues. There were darn few children in general. I even had several minutes with the prize exhibit. The place was really empty on a Thursday afternoon. The second most prized exhibit is a scene of motorized dinosaurs. The most prized exhibit is a cutaway motorized tyrannosaurus with levers that the visitor can use to control it. One lever made it move its body up or down, right or left. The other made it turn its head right or left and open or close its mouth. But it would do only one of the eight actions at a time. Around the trunk the thick rubber skin was cut away so that you could see the motors inside. This is a temporary exhibit, here only through September 1. The models were okay, but they had what I have to call 'wagga.' That is actually a technical term. Wagga is what mimes imitate when they try to look like they are mechanical. Wagga is at the end of a movement: instead of stopping smoothly it shakes back and forth. The Tyrannosaurus had wagga.
Well, so what did they have? They have 3-D reconnaissance pictures. Most did not work rally well but at least one was quite good, showing buildings that really stood up. Reconnaissance picture often are taken in 3-D to make it easier to understand what is in the pictures,
They have some sculptures by Sir Rowland Emmet. These are extremely whimsical machines that have a sort of personality. A flying machine will have been made, in large part, of kitchen utensils. A vacuum cleaner will look more like a sniffing dog. His machines were featured in Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. They are kid-pleasers.
There are stations with electrical experiments, pendulums that mark their paths with sand from a funnel, some poles that work like a theremin, a skeleton on a bicycle that warns kids that they better eat lots and lots of dairy products so they do not get a painful disease called osteoporosis (why do I think the Dairy Council donated this exhibit?). There is a piece where you pump up mountains and pump rivers to show how these forces work. And there are long tubes to pump bubbles into to show what makes bubbles rise and fall. There are two or three different exhibits that create tornadoes, one in a tube of water, one in a chamber that uses spinning air and water vapor. There is a big fan and a beach ball floating above it to demonstrate Bernoulli principles. I played with this a while and had to go chasing the ball several times. And there are rooms that freeze shadows. Mostly they are exhibits I had seen in other museums, but they were fun. A lot of these science exhibits show up in multiple museums. One gets the idea and others copy it. Or one manufacturer will sell the same science exhibit to multiple museums.
There is also a nature walk out behind the museum, but there were few animals to be seen other than birds. Somewhere I have heard that birds are now classified not as descendants of dinosaurs any more. They are now classified as dinosaurs that survived the great extinction. But I bet the nature walk is not as popular as the control-your-own dinosaur exhibit.
After that we went into town to sightsee. We walked through the bottom floor of one of the bath houses. You also see a lot of Bill Clinton Hometown chauvinism. Lots of people in town want you to know that Bill Clinton came from here.
One highlight of seeing the bathhouse was seeing the Scotch Hydrotherapy Machine. It was aweird-looking thing with the gauges and the hoses in the top. It (or one like it) turned out to be an important prop in the film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.
I have to say there is something a little weird about an American town whose economy is based on people getting into hot water and soaking. I know there are places like this in England and Wales, but it seems a really foreign to American culture to make this a major form of entertainment. It is a little like having a whole town whose main form of entertainment is going to the bathroom.The town of Hot Springs is like something from another culture. In fact, it is something out of a culture
that was strong and now is nearly dead. What is surprising is the realization that this culture so recently or ever was alive in the United States. It is hard to believe that a town flourished from people who came to take baths and drink warm, unpleasant water. But now that weird-seeming culture has nearly died for lack of believers, and the town is between strokes waiting for the next big thing, hoping it comes along. |
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